Supply Chain Management

In the face of today’s fast moving industrial environment a business must have a strategy that sets out where it is going, and ahead of time, why and how it’s going to get there. The overall strategy is dependent, amongst other things, upon the management culture which in many firms, large and small, varies in accordance with the changes in management thinking, which has been driven in great measure by the communications explosion over the past twenty years. Much of this has been influenced by US based management gurus like Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and Tom Peters. For example, back in 1982 Tom Peters and Bob Waterman were exhorting us, amongst other things, to: ‘stay close to the customer’; ‘be productive through people’; ‘have a bias for action’. They talked about excellent companies and endorsed and celebrated the big manufacturing businesses like IBM and General Motors. Subsequently, Tom Peters (Thriving on Chaos 1987, and Liberation Management 1992) stated, at the same time as admitting that others had also pointedly suggested to him, ‘that time had not treated some of Search’s almost perfect instruments that well’. In 1992 his message was now to promote Organizational Structure and the speed at which things will be executed in the ‘nanosecond nineties’. This was reinforced in 1999 when Bill Gates, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Microsoft, published a book entitled Business @ the Speed of Thought.